Photos can be digital or scanned, and taken with any kind of camera. A full range of lenses are supported, from simple cameraphones to obscure fisheye lenses. Hugin supports various output projections including a range of spherical, cartographic, and camera projections.

Hugin supports panoramas taken with multiple rows of photos, with or without bracketing. Bracketed photos can be handheld, taken using a DSLR bracketing function, or as consecutive panoramas shot at different EV exposure levels. Hugin can produce successful panoramas shot with cameras that always shoot using auto-exposure and auto-whitebalance.

hugin also supports the use of masks which means that you can exclude parts of images you don't want to appear in your panoramas, or include parts of image you specifically want to appear in your panoramas.

Hugin also uses a separate (background) panorama stitcher. This means that you can render a panorama in the PTBatcherGUI stich window, while working on the next panorama in hugin.

Starting with version 2011.2.0, Hugin is scriptable in Python. The scripting functionality is still in its infancy and requires more development and testing. For now it is available only in Linux and Windows, and currently there is no feedback from the plugin apart from it's success or failure, which is communicated in a dialog. If you're on Linux, you can start hugin from the command line and switch to the window you started it from while the plugin is running - then you'll see any console output it may produce.

User interface

The Hugin version as of version 2013.0.0 (to be released early 2013) consists of three User interfaces: Simple, Advanced and Expert.

Simple, this User interface consists of all basic functionality to create a panorama and will suffice in 90% of all cases.

Advanced, this user interface will start hugin in the Panorama Editor screen. The simple interface is available in the background.

Expert, this user interface also start hugin in the Panorama Editor screen and will unleash all the power and options of hugin.

(Go to Version 2012 and older Gui to read about the "old" gui which is being used in the current stable release. Note that all Hugin 2012 and older versions come with the help screens installed. You can read the same texts as in this wiki by simply opening Hugin and clicking the 'Help' option from the 'Help' menu)

Advanced User Interface

The Panorama Editor window "takes" the foreground but you can still switch to the Simple User interface
which is started as a "background" screen of the Panorama Editor.

Expert User Interface

This one is identical to the Advanced User interface including the Simple User interface screen in the background. It will give you even more options in the form of context-menus (right-click menus) in some parts of the screens.

The Hugin project also provides open source replacements for the small number of closed source components of Panorama tools, especially PTStitcher.
A PTStitcher replacement called nona and a PTOptimizer replacement called autooptimiser have been developed, supporting their most important features.

Development

Hugin is Open Source, and like every community-developed software very much dependent on voluntary contributions of resources. If you have coding skills, you are welcome to look at the source code and contribute to it. Even if you don't have coding skills, you most likely have some skills that the project could use and you are more than welcome to contribute your time. The tasks requiring attention change frequently and so do the required skillset and resources. Find more about the development process.